Siri Hustvedt Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Siri Hustvedt
Libraries are sexual dream factories. The languor brings it on.

Siri Hustvedt
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Siri Hustvedt
Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

Siri Hustvedt
A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Siri Hustvedt
The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading.

Siri Hustvedt
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Siri Hustvedt
Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.

Siri Hustvedt
Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.

Siri Hustvedt
Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit — unconscious and conscious.

Siri Hustvedt
I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

Siri Hustvedt
Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

Siri Hustvedt
It seems to me that going backward sometimes means going forward.

Siri Hustvedt
There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Siri Hustvedt
Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

Siri Hustvedt
I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

Siri Hustvedt
Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

Siri Hustvedt
Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Siri Hustvedt
There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.

Siri Hustvedt
Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.

Siri Hustvedt
Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

Siri Hustvedt
Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.

Siri Hustvedt
The fictive is an enormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

Siri Hustvedt
Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder.

Siri Hustvedt
The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

Siri Hustvedt
That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

Siri Hustvedt
The shaking woman felt like me and not like me at the same time. From the chin up, I was my familiar self. From the neck down, I was a shuddering stranger.

Siri Hustvedt
I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Siri Hustvedt
We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

Siri Hustvedt
Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.

Siri Hustvedt